1. Field of the Invention
The instant invention relates to improvements on a lightweight, portable keyboard instrument which allows the player to move around freely while providing quality and variety of sound which is limited only by the available electronics.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
In recent years many patents have issued and much work has been done in the field of electronic musical instruments, not only to enable instruments to create new sounds, but to free the performer to move around the stage or through the audience.
A remote control electronic system is disclosed extensively in U.S. Pat. No. 4,099,437 which covers the connecting a musical instrument, mainly keyboard type, to an amplifier. Further reference to this system will be incorporated later herein.
Some portability is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,698,276, wherein the entire unit can be collapsed and conveniently moved from location to location. This prior art organ cannot, however, be easily moved around on stage and cannot be moved by the user while playing. With the advent of increased interaction between performers and their audiences, there has been a greater tendency for many performers to leave the stage at times and to move through the audience, speaking to individual persons in the audience and playing musical selections for them. This trend has been accelerated by the advent of wireless microphones, which eliminate the restriction of movement caused by the microphone cable between a performer and his remote amplifier unit.
This method of entertainment, in which a performer moves through an audience and plays musical selections as he moves about, has heretofore been limited to the use of musical devices which were relatively light in weight and sufficiently small in bulk to be portable. Typical devices used by performers moving about in their audiences might be accordians, guitars, violins, small wind instruments, etc.
Because of the obvious size and weight limitations of the musical equipment which a performer can carry as he moves through an audience, it is not possible for such a performer to play relatively bulky and heavy musical devices which produce more impressive, desirable, or preferred sounds, such as pianos or organs. Thus there is a need for a musical system whereby a performer may carry a relatively light weight, relatively small remote unit as he moves through an audience or otherwise moves about, and thereby control the operation of a remote musical device, e.g. a keyboard musical instrument such as piano or organ. Preferably, such a system should employ a wireless communication link between the portable control unit and the remote portions thereof, to eliminate the need for a cumbersome and restrictive cable connection between the same or at least be light weight and require a modest cable connection.
Although systems have been devised for the automatic or remote control of keyboard musical instruments by means of wire data links between the control source and the musical device being played, there has been little or no attention given by practitioners of the electronic musical instrument art to the development of a light weight keyboard devices which can be carried and connected to the bulky electronics by either light cable or wireless control.
For example, the automatic playing of pianos has been a well developed art for over fifty years, the most well known examples of this art being player pianos controlled by perforated paper rolls. In the player piano art there is also known as accessory unit, such as that of U.S. Pat. No. 1,109,554, which can be detachably secured to a piano above the keys thereof, to automatically depress predetermined keys, by means of electrically controlled solenoid devices. U.S. Pat. No. 883,252 shows a bracket arrangement for detachably mounting a piano action, i.e. a playing device to be disposed immediately above the piano keyboard, with facilities for adjusting the bracket position to align the piano action with the underlying piano keyboard keys. These patents are hereby incorporated into this application by reference thereto, to the extent they disclose features applicable to embodiments of the invention herein described.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,709,085 shows a teaching device in which a remote keyboard is provided which is coupled by wires to an elongated housing disposed above the keyboard of a keyboard musical instrument. The housing includes a plurality of solenoids, one solenoid being positioned above each key of the musical instrument to be played, so that in one mode of operation a teacher can play the remote keyboard musical device will be depressed by the remotely controlled solenoids mounted within the elongated housing positioned over the instrument keyboard. See in particular FIG. 15 of this patent and the corresponding discription at column 6, lines 38 to 65. To the extent it is applicable to embodiments of the invention herein described, the disclosure of this patent is incorporated herein by reference thereto.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,610,802 shows an accordian-organ in which the organ electronics and speaker are located in a remote unit connected to the accordian-organ control units by wires.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,825,666 shows a system in which a guitar includes the equivalent of a wireless microphone, i.e. the audio output of the guitar is transduced and radiated to a remote receiver, the output of which drives a speaker. Only the audio signal generated by the guitar is transmitted. There is no transmission of data corresponding to discrete keys, functions, or desired musical sounds.
The use of multiplex techniques and computer storage and retrieval in conjunction with electronic organs is well known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,905,267 shows an arrangement for utilizing multiplex techniques to transform the key depressions of an organ (corresponding to a musical composition being played on the organ) into a digital code. The code is then recorded on a tape recorder, for later playback through a decoder which drives solenoids to depress the organ keys to replay the original composition.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,915,047 and 3,926,088 describe arrangements in which an organ is electronically coupled to a computer by wires and the organ keys being depressed during a performance are converted into digital data which is stored or analyzed by the computer scheme for displaying the music in musical notation as it is played by the performer.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,968,716 shows a keyboard instrument employing multiplex transmission by wires from the keyboard to remote tone generators (multiplex is employed to reduce the number of wires needed), and wireless transmission of the audio information from the tone generators to remote speakers. Like U.S. Pat. No. 3,825,666 this system does not employ wireless transmission of data corresponding to particular keys or musical sounds to be reproduced.
Multiplex schemes for multiplexing the information as to which keys are being depressed during a performance on an organ are also described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,875,842, 3,899,951 and 3,916,750, none of which employ an asynchronous organ key scanning arrangement employed in the embodiment of the instant invention hereafter described; however, as will become apparent upon studying the detailed description of said embodiment which follows, there are differences in implementation between said patent and the aforementioned embodiment.
Starting with the big bands of yesteryear to the rock bands of today, the best known member of the band has been the person in front of the audience, the person who could move around and play directly to the audience. This is even more obvious with the guitar players of the rock bands of today. The guitar players move to the music, walk to the edge of the stage to converse with the audience and develop a rapport with their fans, expecially to the opposite sex. Heretofore the players of the large instruments, the piano, organ and synthesizer, have been trapped at the back of the stage, relatively unknown and unnoticed by their fans.
The accordian, once a popular instrument and capable of producing a pleasant, unique sound, has dwindled in popularity. some reasons for this loss may be the lack of "sex appeal", the weight and the limited control of sound caused by the manual operation of the bellows.
All of the heretofore mentioned problems have been overcome in the instant invention by use of a light-weight, portable, multi-sound and multi-positioned keyboard unit.